Who’s Making the “Uncharted” Game for the Sony NGP? Not Who You Think.

Sony showed off an impressively, shiny slice of an Uncharted game for the NGP when their PSP successor debuted last week in Japan. Fans of Nathan Drakes’s globe-trotting exploits are no doubt excited that he’ll be making his first appearance in a handheld game on the powerful Next Generation Portable, which will give them new ways to play with two touch inputs. But, per a Gamasutra article, it won’t be Naughty Dog–the studio responsible for creating the award-winning fan favorite series on the PS3–who’ll be bringing the treasure hunter to the new device.

That’s because Sony’s handing off development duties on the portable Uncharted to a lesser-known studio. Naughty Dog’s presumably still plugging away at Uncharted 3, the sequel that supposed to hit shelves this November, so the development being handled by the Sony Bend studio. Their most recent work was the Resistance: Retribution game on the current-generation PSP, a game which was well-received. (More on Time.com:NGP vs. 3DS vs. iOS vs. Android: Which Gaming Platform Will Earn Your Love?)

Of course, this isn’t the first time Sony’s made such a move. The stellar God of War games on PSP have come not from the Sony Santa Monica in-house team, but from the Ready at Dawn development house. Likewise, the portable Clank and Daxter games spun out from the Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter franchises have been built by studios other than the ones that originated them. The NGP version of Uncharted isn’t the only game getting this treatment, either. Dev studio Nihilistic will be delivering another portable Resistance game to the NGP while Insomniac continues work on Resistance 3. While it may trouble fans that the bigger studios who’ve made the PS3 versions of these games won’t be steering them to a new stage, they’re probably getting as much support from the parent teams as possible. It’s fair to say that the success of Sony’s NGP handheld might depend on it.